CHANDIGARH: Blowing hot and cold over the probable fee hike in the coming academic session (2019-20), the authorities at Panjab University have been oscillating between extremes since March to have finally inched towards the golden mean now.

SAN FRANCISCO: Real estate title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. had leaked a whopping 885 million sensitive customer financial records, going back to 2003, on its website for everybody to access.

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SAN FRANCISCO

Real estate title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. had leaked a whopping 885 million sensitive customer financial records, going back to 2003, on its website for everybody to access.

According to KrebsOnSecurity.com, a website that covers computer security and cyber crime, the real estate title insurance giant leaked hundreds of millions of documents related to mortgage deals included bank account numbers and statements, mortgage and tax records, Social Security numbers, wire transaction receipts, and driver's license images.

"Ben Shoval, the developer who notified KrebsOnSecurity about the data exposure, said that's because First American is one of the most widely-used companies for real estate title insurance and for closing real estate deals—where both parties to the sale meet in a room and sign stacks of legal documents," KrebsOnSecurity.com reported this week.

Shoval shared a document link he had been given by First American from a recent transaction, which referenced a record number that was nine digits long and dated April 2019.

Modifying the document number in his link by numbers in either direction yielded other peoples' records before or after the same date and time, indicating the document numbers may have been issued sequentially.

"The earliest document number available on the site (000000075) referenced to a real estate transaction from 2003. From there, the dates on the documents get closer to real time with each forward increment in the record number," the report added. — IANS

ROME: Italian archaeologists have unearthed a white marble head, possibly of a goddess, dating back to the Imperial Age, the Superintendence of Cultural and Archaeological Heritage of Rome announced on Friday.

WASHINGTON: SpaceX has launched a rocket carrying the first 60 satellites of its "Starlink" constellation, which is intended to provide internet from space in an array that could one day contain over 12,000 orbiting transponders.

LONDON: Scientists say they have uncovered the oldest meteorite collection on Earth's surface in Chile's Atacama Desert, allowing them to reconstruct the rate of falling meteorites over the past two million years.

SHANGHAI: China is to blame for much of the increase in illegal ozone-depleting substances (ODS) since 2013, according a study published by the journal Nature on Thursday, with domestic companies accused of violating a global production ban.

HOUSTON: Scientists have discovered one of the largest water reservoirs on Mars, in the form of ice layers buried over a kilometre beneath the surface, a finding that may reveal whether the Red Planet was habitable in the past.

WASHINGTON: More than 150 million people are gaining access to electricity every year, reducing the ranks of those who live without power, but this is not enough to meet global development goals, according to a report released on Wednesday.

BERLIN: A cosmic body that hit the Earth and led to the formation of the Moon about 4.4 billion years ago may have also delivered large quantities of water to our home planet, making it habitable, scientists have found.

NEW DELHI: After Facebook that is battling several data breaches, its photo-sharing service Instagram saw itself in trouble after personal data of millions of celebrities and influencers were allegedly exposed on its platform in a massive database that was traced to Mumbai-based social media marketing firm Chtrbox.

MELBOURNE: Scientists have discovered 15 new sites in Laos containing over a hundred mysterious 1,000-year-old massive stone jars—similar to those found in India and Indonesia—possibly used to bury the dead.

DUBAI: There is a growing teleconnection between Indian summer monsoon rainfall and Atlantic sea surface temperature anomalies, said a new study which is likely to brighten the prospect of a more accurate monsoon prediction in India.

NEW YORK: You would never forget that inconspicuous street corner where you kissed her for the first time. However, according to researchers, our attitudes can be influenced not only by what we actually experience but also by what we imagine.

HYDERABAD: Chronic stress due to health and management issues like old age, improper flooring and cleanliness, besides others, plague cows kept in various shelters in the country, according to a study.

SAN FRANCISCO: Joining the Competition Commission of India (CCI) and the European Union (EU), Italy's antitrust authority has become the latest international regulatory body to launch an anti-competition investigation against Google.

MELBOURNE: An estimated 414 million pieces of plastic—including nearly one million shoes and 370,000 toothbrushes—have been found washed ashore on the beaches of remote Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean, according to a study.

SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk's company SpaceX has once again postponed the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket carrying the first 60 Starlink Internet communications satellites, this time owing to a "software issue".

In February this year, nearly 1,000 students (from classes six to eleven) of a school in eastern Kolkata selected a stretch of road as their canvas to create colourful street floor art, or alpana (also alpona), as part of the Saraswati Puja celebrations.

Photographed and curated by Virendra Bangroo, a recent exhibition on the Dard Aryans of Ladakh at the India International Centre, New Delhi, is both a tribute to their rich and ancient social and cultural legacy, and a fervent appeal to preserve their unique identity, which is rapidly getting eroded due to severe isolation in the inaccessible and tough terrain of Ladakh.